With the NHS turning 70, it’s natural that people’s minds turn to the past, harking back to the days before health care was free at the point of use, back to the first days of NHS rollout and the myriad twists and turns that brought us to the UK’s largest employer in 2018.

We’re a curious bunch at Kaleidoscope, and all this talk of the past naturally turned our thoughts to the opposite: the future of health and care.

Last year we ran Writing the Future, the world’s largest health science fiction writing prize. We asked authors far and wide to consider health in the UK in 2100; what wild and wonderful tech would be in use, what kind of society we’d be living in and whether anything of the NHS would be left at all.

We published all six fantastic finalist stories, and also compiled them into a Writing the Future book, which has been our go-to gift for birthdays, anniversaries and all other momentous occasions ever since.

We had live readings from the six stories, as well as speeches on the future of health and care, at the historic Old Operating Theatre. If you missed out first time around you can still listen to the readings and speeches.

But the story doesn’t end there. In addition to the final six, we were blown away with a whole host of entries that ignited our imaginations. To mark the NHS’s 70th birthday, we’d like to share our Kaleidoscope summer reading list: a further 20 Writing the Future stories for your perusal.

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